Roborock’s developing robot uses legs to climb and clean stairs

You can do other things while the robot vacuum cleaner is running around the living room. However, if your house has stairs, the story is different. There is still work to be done to move it upstairs, and the stairs between floors have to be cleaned by someone again. Within the same home, some surfaces can be cleaned automatically while others still need a person.

What matters about Saros Rover, the stair-cleaning robot Roborock is developing, is the boundary it aims to cross. To keep cleaning while people are away, it has to handle changes in height inside a home. Moving well across a flat floor cannot get it everywhere.

If you can lift the wheel

Saros Rover, unveiled by Roborock at CES 2026, combines wheels and legs. The wheel-leg structures on either side can rise and lower independently. Rather than only rolling along the floor, they support the body as it negotiates changes in height.

The official demonstration shows the robot climbing stairs and cleaning each tread. This involves moving from one floor to the next and cleaning in between. The manufacturer explains that it controls movement using sensors and spatial information. The ability to respond to various stairs is the manufacturer's announcement and is not the result of our actual testing at home.

The legs attached to the bottom of the vacuum cleaner are a bit unfamiliar. Still, if you see the main body being lifted in front of one step of the stairs, you can quickly see what they are trying to solve. What comes to mind is not another suction-power figure, but the moments when a person previously had to lift the vacuum.

Cleaning that follows the shape of the house

The house is not made flat for a vacuum cleaner. There are thresholds, floor materials change, and some houses have stairs connecting floors. How much of a home can be left to a vacuum depends on how well the machine handles these conditions.

However, the revealed operation should not be read directly as the performance of a product that can be purchased today. The CES announcement stated that it is a product under development and no release date has been set. The official introduction in September also emphasized a design that handles stairs and slopes, but the materials reviewed for this article did not confirm that sales had begun.

The reason this vacuum cleaner is interesting is not because it tries to look like a human. This is because the use of wheels was changed to answer a very realistic task called stairs. The few steps still left for a person after delegating the rest of the cleaning became a starting point for the next design.